By Lorenz S. Marasigan, BusinessMirror – March 26, 2017
GLOBE Telecom Inc. is a step closer toward its goal of providing richer and enhanced international connectivity to businesses in Davao City and the rest of the country, after successfully landing over the weekend the Southeast Asia-United States (SEA-US) submarine cable system in Mindanao.
Mike Frausing, who sits as a senior advisor at the company, said this investment allows Globe to “finally address the rising demand for Internet services from businesses in the Philippines.”
“We are very near commercial operations. Once it commences, the cable system will be able to provide greater route flexibility and better future support for bandwidth-dependent applications and services consistent with the growing trend of companies shifting their business critical operations to digital,” he said.
The SEA-US cable was connected to the Globe cable landing station in Barangay Talomo, Davao City, which also houses the power-feed equipment necessary to run the system.
The system will link five areas and territories, which include Manado (Indonesia), Davao (the Philippines), Piti (Guam), Oahu (Hawaii, United States) and Los Angeles (California, US).
At a project cost of around $250 million, the 14,000-kilometer cable system will consist of two fiber pairs with an initial design capacity of 20 terabits per second (Tb/s), and will use the latest in submarine fiber-optic technology with 100-gigabit per-second transmission equipment per pair. Such additional capacity will cater to the exponential growth of bandwidth between Southeast Asia and the US.
“This will definitely benefit Davao City, especially the service sector, such as the business-process outsourcing and banking and finance, as well as the whole Philippines,” Davao Councilor Bernard Al-ag said.
The system is expected to ease the country’s dependence on international cable systems routed through northern Philippines, and prevent a repeat of a 2008 incident, where major international cables were broken due to the Taiwan earthquake, thereby leaving the Philippines isolated for a few days in terms of Internet connectivity.
